Week 7 - Spaces

Mixing in an unfamiliar environment was something I never really considered. Fighting the low end of the stage was incredibly difficult. By no means did we get it perfect, we could have spent so much longer on it but when it was pointed out that when it comes to mixing a solo artist with a backing band you should really focus on the main elements and try to avoid wasting time on aspects of the performance that might not be as important. That's not to say you should considered them but if they are the one issue your fighting but really they don't register to high on the list of things that you need to really make stand out, don't fight it.

There mental approach to live sounds continues to reveal itself as being quite different than the studio. It's so different to think of how you are going to capture and enhance a total performance rather than just random takes. It's a continual thing as well. There's no set and forget aspect to live sound which for a long time I assumed there was. I think that might just be a result of having really awful sound engineers in the past. Watching someone wander off for a cigarette or to take a seat at a bar is rather infuriating when they are supposed to be standing at the ready behind a mixing console.

On the weekend I went to a show at a space in West Melbourne that would have sent any sound engineer mental. The sound engineer that was present on the night was also the classic example of the person I described above. So much went wrong over the course of the night and when it did he always seemed to be somewhere drinking or smoking. He even blew one half of the PA. It was a generator show at an old abandoned shipping yard and the warehouse would have been at least 100m by 30m with a 10 metre ceiling made entirely out of corrugated iron. The RT60 time on this place was ridiculous but for the sort of music that was happening inside it was almost complementary. A handful of people also decided to light a fire in the middle of the crowd as well as one point. Hazards of a space.

This evening I listened to this guy called Nils Frahm. I had never heard of him until someone at this show told to check him out. He's a pianist from Germany but does a lot of really odd ambient stuff as well. It's quite Brian Eno-esque. Fittingly, he has a record called Spaces.